Mirosław Ikonowicz writes about decades of friendship with Ryszard Kapuściński — his courage, leftist sympathies, and rather conservative attitude toward women — in the book “Hombre Kapuściński”, which reached bookshops on 6 October. In Latin American countries, the word hombre means a man, but also a man of honour and a gentleman — that is how Ikonowicz saw Kapuściński, with whom he was friends for almost his entire life. They met in their second year of studies at the History Faculty of Warsaw University, later worked together at PAP and for Polityka, jointly covered the war in Angola, and worked in Latin American countries at the same time. Ikonowicz stresses that he does not enter into polemic with Artur Domosławski, whose biography Kapuściński Non-Fiction caused such controversy. “I read that book carefully only after writing my own. It is a biography; my portrait of Rysiek is a subjective account of our friendship,” the author of Hombre Kapuściński emphasises.

Ikonowicz’s book transports the reader into the world of pre-internet journalism, the romantic era of teleprinters and reporters’ solidarity. “Poland was the kind of Warsaw Pact country where, at a certain moment, it became possible for relatively independent journalism to emerge. Everything we wrote about exotic countries referred in some way to Poland. From the turn of the 1960s and 1970s comes an example from Kapuściński’s work: describing a military dictatorship in distant Guatemala, he wrote about a characteristic ‘silence’ in the service of the dictatorship. If radio broadcasts only songs, advertisements, and curiosities, the station is working in the service of silence — so Kapuściński wrote about Guatemala. Years later, his words about silence in the service of dictatorship were written on the walls of the internment centre at Białołęka,” Ikonowicz recalled.

In his early youth the future author of The Emperor was in a phase of fascination with the new socialist reality. “Rysiek’s ideological commitment was not easy or declarative. (…) He genuinely and practically devoted himself to realising his ideals,” Ikonowicz writes, recalling how Kapuściński used to travel to Nowa Huta and to coal mines to work as a volunteer. In the mine, the slight Kapuściński could not hold a pneumatic drill, which struck him in the stomach. The result was serious injuries and a stay in hospital. Although within a few years Kapuściński’s enthusiasm for the Polish People’s Republic was exhausted, until the end of his life he remained “on the side of the poor.”

The author of Christ with a Rifle on His Shoulder, who translated Che Guevara’s Diary into Polish, said of the Comandante: “He is something of a hero in the Polish style. A partisan, an insurgent, a leader of an insurrection that never came to fruition, ready to take up a hopeless fight in the name of another’s freedom and his own moral convictions,” Ikonowicz recalls. “We both knew that in the final months of his life Guevara was fighting not only against the hegemony of the American Big Brother, but also against the USSR, which, while proclaiming internationalism, was pursuing its own interests in the Third World.” Ikonowicz has personal memories connected with Guevara, with whom he held several long conversations — on one occasion he participated in the sugar cane harvest, working side by side with Che, who, being asthmatic, fell behind.

Kapuściński aroused in women a sense of trust and a desire to win him over, Ikonowicz writes. “He was charming and the girls liked him — boyish, a little helpless, with his head in the clouds,” recalls one fellow student from those years. He did not, however, care for self-assured feminists; he believed that in the difficult profession of reporter, a wife’s mission was to understand and support her husband, to wait and — when necessary — to set aside her own plans. Alicja, Kapuściński’s future wife, was regarded as the most beautiful girl in the year. “Rysiek could not have done better. She is not a domineering woman. If she were, their relationship would have had to be very short or would not have been possible at all,” Ikonowicz believes.

One admirer of Kapuściński’s talent was Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, who after reading Shah of Shahs was determined at all costs to sign the author for her publishing house. She made efforts to contact him; chance decreed that her letter reached him with great delay, by which time Kapuściński had other publishing commitments in the United States.

“PAP in those days was an ambitious but poor agency. Travelling as war correspondents to various flashpoints around the world, its envoys were not even insured,” Ikonowicz recalls. At the beginning of 1975, during a stay in Portugal, he received a phone call from Warsaw. “Rysiek is stuck in Luanda without money and without cigarettes. He’s living in some terrible African hotel… Do something,” Michał Czarnecki from PAP’s Warsaw headquarters said dramatically. Sending several hundred dollars in small notes and cigarettes seemed an impossible task — that kind of parcel was confiscated in Luanda right at the airport. Ikonowicz worked a miracle. An envelope containing 300 dollars in small bills and several cartons of American cigarettes travelled through official government channels, authorised by the Portuguese Prime Minister himself. Kapuściński, woken in the night by military police and driven by jeep to the outskirts of the city, had already been saying his farewells to life, and was very surprised when, at a Portuguese air base outside Luanda, a package was handed to him with full honours — money and cigarettes from the Prime Minister of Portugal himself.

There were dangerous moments. In the heart of Black Africa, Kapuściński fell ill with cerebral malaria, which, if left untreated, is fatal. Fearing a recall to Warsaw, he also concealed from the editorial board that his tuberculosis had recurred, and sought treatment at a clinic for local patients to avoid sending bills from a fee-paying hospital to Warsaw. “Besides, he wanted to be as close as possible to the people he was writing about, to live their lives a little. Instead of staying in hotels for whites, he lodged in bug-infested boarding houses in Black neighbourhoods and in the modest homes of his Ugandan or Tanzanian friends,” Ikonowicz recalls. In the end, news of Kapuściński’s “health troubles” reached the editorial board. Alicja Kapuścińska, a doctor by profession, was despatched to Tanganyika to help him.

Kapuściński and Ikonowicz together lived through the experience of the African war in Angola, which they covered from the side of the People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola — the MPLA, the government army. Ikonowicz stresses that, assuming the existence of just wars, they were fortunate to be on the right side of the front, though a reporter usually has no choice. The UN recognised the MPLA at the very beginning of the civil war, which was unleashed by rival guerrilla movements. The civil war broke out in Angola in 1975 after Portugal granted it independence. It lasted 27 years and cost a million lives. It was only in 2009 that documents were declassified which provide an answer to the question Kapuściński asked himself — how it came about that at a decisive moment in the war on the Angolan front, Cuban soldiers appeared and saved the threatened MPLA. Although to this day many people believe the Cubans came to Angola with Moscow’s agreement, it was in fact a unilateral action by Fidel Castro, who did not trust the Soviet allies and wanted to test them — while strengthening his own position as one of the leaders of the Third World — writes the author of Hombre Kapuściński.

“The rumours that during the war in Angola Kapuściński took up arms are untrue. General Farrusco, a participant in that war and a friend of the Polish reporter, when asked directly, firmly denied it. He said that the only weapon with which Kapuściński fought in that war was his camera,” Ikonowicz says.

“Anyone who had the good fortune to speak with Kapuściński often remained under the impression of that conversation for the rest of their life. He had an extraordinary ability to listen to his interlocutor, born of an insatiable, deeply benevolent curiosity about people and the world. Everyone felt somehow affirmed in Rysiek’s company, and never intimidated. Perhaps it was the sensitivity and imagination of a writer who was a child of the Polish borderlands that gave him an extraordinary personal humility, despite the worldwide success that had fallen to the lot of very few,” the journalist believes.

Mirosław Ikonowicz began working at PAP more than half a century ago as a 22-year-old junior editor in the socialist countries department. He then served as agency correspondent in Sofia (1956–1958), from where he was expelled as persona non grata, in Havana (1963–1969), and in Madrid and Lisbon (1973–1980). From Havana he also travelled to other Latin American countries. From Madrid and Lisbon he made forays into Africa as a war correspondent, covering the conflicts in Angola and Mozambique. He observed six revolutions, including the “Carnation Revolution” in Portugal in 1974. He was PAP correspondent in Rome first from 1981 to 1986, and then from 1990 to 1994. He covered papal foreign pilgrimages more closely than any other Polish journalist, travelling with John Paul II to 23 countries. He is the author of books including The Correspondent’s Trade, Spain Without Castanets, and Angola Express.

The book “Hombre Kapuściński” was published by Rosner & Wspólnicy.

Source: PAP

source: kapuscinski.info